10 Amazon EC2 Alternatives

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is dersigned to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.

Slicehost / Rackspace

Create Cloud Virtual Servers in minutes and pay per usage. Get a Windows or Linux Cloud Server with root access. 1 to 50 servers in minutes. Choose a server size and pay for what you use. Accessible via online control panel and open API. Easily Control Your DNS. Fully customizable with root access. Fanatical Support always included. No long-term contracts, pay for what you use. Up to 30 GB servers.

Clouder

Clouder has adopted the latest innovations in cloud virtualization and storage to give early access to industry-leading technologies. Not exactly a 1:1 for Amazon EC2, they work to eliminate the “middle layers” of the virtualization of cloud computing. They propose that by eliminating the need of a “hypervisor” and by sharing a common layer of OS, that their container technology gives Fast Provisioning, Better Elasticity ( container resources can be easily scaled up without reboot ), and Higher Performance due to the efficiency of each container. They are currently offering 3 months of free hosting as they are currently in beta.

MediaTemple

Media Temple hosts web sites. Big and Small. For years we’ve taken complex technology and simplified it for the everyday web site owner. Our products are designed to be powerful, affordable and relevant. Please take a look around; perhaps (mt) is a good choice for your next project.

Slicify

Slicify – Crowd-sourced Compute. Not exactly a 1:1 alternative, Slicify is a marketplace where individuals and businesses can buy high-performance compute power from anyone with a Windows PC. As a result, they can offer CPU power for batch processing, heavy calculations and online workloads (such as CGI/rendering, data analysis, scientific computing and more) at a fraction of the price of traditional cloud compute providers.

Windows Azure

Terremark / vCloud Express

Terremark brings the power of the cloud to the enterprise with solutions built to integrate seamlessly into your existing I.T. infrastructure, compatible with your existing applications, and conforming to your policies and compliance needs, helping you move faster, respond quicker, and accelerate innovation. Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud gives you precise, dynamic allocation of computing resources with the scale, performance and security to handle enterprise-wide applications. Large organizations, IT executives and multi-site teams will appreciate the robust solution for its multi-user capacity, dedicated resource pool architecture and role-based security model as well as private network connectivity and physical device integration.

Xen Cloud Computing

Cambridge University started the Xenoservers project, aiming to develop public infrastructure for wide-area distributed computing, in the late 1990s. In 1999, The Cambridge team published a Hot Topics in Operating Systems paper that described Xenoservers as “A new distributed computing paradigm, termed global public computing, which allows any user to run any code anywhere. Such platforms price computing resources, and ultimately charge users for resources consumed.”
http://www.xenproject.org/users/cloud.html

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus is the world’s most widely deployed cloud computing software platform for on-premise (private) Infrastructure as a Service clouds. It uses existing infrastructure to create scalable and secure AWS-compatible cloud resources for compute, network and storage.

DuraCloud

DuraCloud makes it easy to store and do more in the cloud. Our service makes the preservation of your content simple and cost effective. DuraCloud is the only service that makes it easy to move copies of your content into the cloud and store them with several different providers, all with just one click. We eliminate the risk of storing content with a single cloud provider by making it easy to move and copy files of any shape or size.

GoGrid

GoGrid cloud hosting allows you to build scalable cloud infrastructure in multiple data centers using dedicated and cloud servers, elastic F5 hardware load balancing, and cloud storage with total control through automation and self-service.

AT&T Cloud Architech

Now, complicated configurations are a thing of the past. With AT&T Cloud Architect, there’s an automated, standardized and fast way to pick, provision and deploy servers over the web within minutes or hours, not days. There’s no need to buy or build out your own on-premises infrastructure.

IBM Cloud Computing

More for companies than individuals, IBM offers a cloud “IBM SmartCloud is our family of enterprise-class cloud computing technologies and services for securely building and using private, public and hybrid clouds.”

OVH (uk based)

OpenStack

Open source software for building private and public clouds. OpenStack Software delivers a massively scalable cloud operating system. A global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich.

Earthlink Cloud

HPCC Systems

HPCC (High Performance Computing Cluster) is a massive parallel-processing computing platform that solves Big Data problems. The platform is Open Source. Enterprise Edition is a subscription-based offering of the HPCC technology for developers. It includes software, services and support to deliver the highest levels of reliability, security, and uptime proven over the years in mission-critical industrial settings. Prices are per year, per node with up to 8 CPU cores installed.

Google Storage

More of an S3 alternative than an EC2 alternative, there is Google Storage. “Google Storage is based on the company’s own infrastructure. Pricing is calculated on usage of space and bandwidth.” Also check our their other cloud platform tools

8 Responses to 10 Amazon EC2 Alternatives

This is a pretty exhaustive list, but I would also throw Atlantic.net onto it. They offer very competitive priced IaaS services with great customer service and have been in the hosting space for over twenty years, so you know they’re not going anywhere.

NetSource in Chicago is another good alternative. We operate our own datacenter. We can provide customers a private cloud where they virtualize a couple dedicated servers and provide a dedicated SAN. We crate a fully private cloud that will allow you to spin up 30+ cloud instances starting at $1,200 month.

Our platform Slicify is also an alternative (it was launched after this article was written). Rather than just selling you machines from our own data centre, we crowd-source – allowing anyone with a Windows PC to sell their machine by the hour on our platform. That results in much lower rates than any other EC2 alternative.

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